The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing

Nineteen

Facecream lay on her bedroll staring up at the ceiling fan – it was a good two hours after the lights had been switched off in the dormitory. The mantra in praise of Shiva, which she and her fellow devotees had spent most of the evening repeating over and over again, was playing back in her head.

“Om namah Shivaya. Om namah Shivaya. Om namah Shivaya…”

According to Maharaj Swami’s philosophy, repetition of such mantras would help awaken her spiritual life force, her Kundalini, as well as stimulate her chakras.

So far, though, all she had got out of the exercise was a splitting headache.

She tried to focus her mind on other things: her adopted eight-year-old son, Momo, who was being looked after by her ayah; her flat in Delhi, where the three of them lived together; the hungry street cats that perched on her wall and meowed and yowled until she fed them.

She sang herself one of her favorite Hindi songs, “Paani Paani Re.” But nothing worked. The mantra kept cutting back into her thought processes like a traffic update on FM radio. “Om namah Shivaya.”

Aaaagh! No wonder so many of the devotees wore eerie, passive-aggressive grins, she thought.

At three in the morning, Facecream crawled out from under her mosquito net and, chappals in hand, tiptoed silently from the dormitory.

The corridor beyond was dark and empty. Facecream made her way to the stairs and crept down to the ground floor. Upon reaching the bottom and hearing footsteps approaching, she ducked under the stairwell. One of Maha-raj Swami’s senior devotees shuffled past, clicking his bead necklace between his fingers, and exited through the front door of the residence hall.

Puri’s operative stepped out from her hiding place and made for the emergency side door, which was propped open and, like all such doors in India, never alarmed.

It was cooler outside. A light breeze played in the topmost branches of the Himalayan maple next to the building. Crouched beneath it, Facecream took several deep breaths to calm her nerves and surveyed the surrounding terrain.

The wide lawn in front of the tree ended at the edge of the driveway, which was lined with lollipop streetlights and statues of Hindu saints. To her left lay the car park and, far beyond, the main gate, where nighttime chowkidars were sitting around playing cards. Above the din of chirping crickets could be heard snippets of conversation and laughter.

Off to the right stood the main reception building and behind this the darshan hall and Maharaj Swami’s residence, where there were only a couple of lights on.

Facecream spent ten minutes under the maple tree making sure that the coast was clear. Then she made her way to the darshan hall, keeping to the shadows and meandering between plinths, benches and trees. She reached a side door that was warped and didn’t close properly and slipped inside the building.

Although the lights were all off and no moonlight filtered in through the stained glass windows, there were still enough candles burning under the effigies for her to see her way up onto the stage.

There, she had to switch on Flush’s pocket-size flashlight in order to search for the trapdoor behind Maharaj Swami’s silver throne she was sure must be there. Facecream soon came across its outline but in the process bumped her head into something hard – a large pane of thin glass about ten feet across and at least twenty feet high suspended on ultrathin wires from the ceiling. Hanging at an angle of forty-five degrees over the trapdoor, it touched the stage at its base.

Puri’s operative felt her way behind the glass and discovered a second, smaller trapdoor. This one had a latch.

It lifted easily to reveal a set of concrete stairs.

At the bottom, Facecream found herself standing at the beginning of a passage.

On one side stood a door.

The room beyond was roughly ten feet square and twenty feet high. Its ceiling was the underside of the larger of the two trapdoors. Now she could see that it was designed to open downward on quiet rubber-lined tracks. A switch on the wall operated a mechanical pulley system like those used on automatic garage doors.

In the middle of the room stood a plinth with a light projector on top of it. The front of the projector was raised up on a block. It was pointing at a wooden platform built against the wall at the back of the room. The platform stood about six feet off the ground and could be reached by a ladder.

On the wall opposite the platform hung a large silvered mirror positioned at an angle of forty-five degrees.

There were only two pieces of furniture in the room: a chair and a dressing table. In a drawer of the latter, she found a rubber mask. Its face was that of a wizened old man with a thick, bulbous nose and pronounced frontal lobes.

Facecream recognized it instantly: it was the rishi oracle.

She spent a few minutes trying to make sense of how the illusion worked and thought she understood. An actor wearing the mask stood on the platform and the light projector was switched on. His brightly lit profile appeared in the silvered mirror and was reflected up to the pane of glass on the stage through the trapdoors, which opened on demand. Somehow – science was not her strong point – this created a ghostlike image. The smoke was an extra touch to make the illusion all the more spectacular.

The room also contained a hydraulic lift, which, according to the instructions on the control panel, could be raised to a height of twenty-five feet. Facecream wondered if perhaps this was the secret behind Maharaj Swami’s levi-tation.

Venturing farther down the damp and musty passage with her flashlight’s feeble beam catching glimpses of the odd rat, she soon came to an intersection. The passage to the left, she guessed, led to the Abode of Tranquility; the one to the right, back to the residence hall. Facecream took neither of these, pressing on through puddles of water, until about a hundred yards farther on, she reached another set of stairs.

These led up to yet another door.

Switching off her flashlight, she pushed it open an inch and peeked through the gap. The room beyond was dark, but she recognized the desk with the computer on top of it by the window and realized with glee that she had found her way into Maharaj Swami’s private audience chamber.

The door was a secret one disguised amongst the bookshelves.

She opened it a little wider so that she could get a better look.

The Venetian blinds were drawn and the only source of light was coming from beneath the main door to the room, which was on her right.

Suddenly she heard male voices and footsteps beyond in the echoey entrance hall and stepped back, pulling the secret door almost shut.

For several minutes she waited, not daring to venture into the room. Finally the voices faded and the light was switched off.

Silence.

Facecream slipped off one of her chappals and lodged it between the door and the wall. Risking her flashlight again, she stole across the room to Maharaj Swami’s desk. Following Flush’s instructions, she turned on the computer and, by holding down the escape key, ensured that it booted up in DOS.

She drew the om pendant from around her neck and pulled it apart to reveal the USB data key inside. This she inserted into one of the computer’s ports, typed the word ‘copy’ and pressed the return key.

The process took only a few minutes. Then she retrieved the key, put it back around her neck and switched off the machine.

Opening the metal door that she had spotted during her private audience with Swami-ji did not prove as easy. The two warded locks were both different, and she had to make subtle alterations to two different skeleton keys in order to get them open.

Finally, however, the second of the locks let out a satisfying click.

Fully fireproofed, windowless and meticulously organized, the room beyond was a veritable Aladdin’s cave – not of jewels and coins but of information.

Manish the Magnificent had been right. Maharaj Swami – Aman in his former incarnation – was an obsessive hoarder. Stacked on the shelves along both walls were boxes and silver metal trunks. The room was an archive of memorabilia collected from an early age.

It read like an autobiography.

All the props the young Aman had used in his teens and early twenties as a traveling street magician were there – dusty old wicker baskets, aluminum swords and a bed of nails. There were bottles of chemicals, some with still legible labels: “Potassium Permanganate’, ‘Glycerine’, ‘Yellow Phosphorous.” And Facecream came across photographs taken of him performing for tourists in front of the Taj Mahal when he was no more than seventeen – skinny, pencil-thin moustache, suit two sizes too small.

Aman had evidently traveled the length and breadth of India. And then, at the age of twenty-seven, he had left the country. In one box marked ‘USA’, she discovered souvenir postcards, ticket stubs, brochures and a crude diary detailing his travels. Far from sitting in a cave attaining nirvana as he claimed to have done, Maharaj Swami had traveled to Las Vegas, where he had won nearly nine thousand dollars on blackjack and watched David Copperfield perform!

“To Aman with love, David,” read the dedication scrawled in marker pen on a glossy headshot of Mr. Copperfield. Attached was the pink flamingo drink stirrer that had dressed the Long Island iced tea he had drunk at Caesars Palace after the show.

From America, Aman had traveled across Europe, Russia and the Far East, seeking out the world’s greatest magicians and working for some of them as an understudy.

Finally, at the age of thirty-four, he had returned to India and dedicated two years to mastering yoga. It was during this period that he had come to meet the man in the black sherwani. His name, according to Aman’s diary from this period, was Vivek Swaroop, and he was a graduate of Harvard Business School. At the time of their first meeting, he had been working for another internationally successful guru in Pune, marketing his books and health products and running his ashram, which catered to Western, spirituality-seeking tourists.

Aman and Swaroop had teamed up, and a year later, Ma-haraj Swami had emerged from his long years of isolation high up in the Himalayas to establish the Abode of Eternal Love in Haridwar.

The room was well stocked with the everyday accoutrements he needed to be a successful miracle worker – ‘sacred’ stone eggs that he claimed to produce from his stomach; fake thumb tips into which he concealed pellets of condensed vibhuti; camphor tablets that burned harmlessly on the skin or the tongue.

In one of the metal trunks, Facecream also came across a collection of notebooks in which Aman kept meticulous notes on how his illusions were performed. There were a couple of pages illustrating how he levitated in the darshan hall (as she’d suspected, he sat on a Perspex stand; this in turn was mounted on the platform of the hydraulic lift). And she discovered diagrams pertaining to new miracles he was in the process of developing. The most ambitious involved producing hundreds of fish from a single specimen. He was also working on walking on water.

Facecream could find no reference to the Kali illusion, but there was a file on Dr. Suresh Jha. Much of the information it contained had been gathered over the past few years by a private detective in Delhi, one of Puri’s rivals. Bank details, names and addresses of family members, a short biography of his secretary, Ms. Ruchi, even pictures of the Laughing Club taken on a telephoto lens. There were transcripts of telephone conversations, which indicated that DIRE’s phones had been tapped, and a special dossier on whom the Guru Buster had talked to during his investigation into the death of Manika Gill. A letter to Vivek Swa-roop marked confidential and dated a month earlier warned that Jha had gathered ‘a great deal of information’ on the case and was planning to ‘petition the Supreme Court to order a murder investigation’.

Facecream returned the file to the shelf and noticed some video equipment at the back of the room – a recorder and a monitor. These, she soon discovered, were linked to a hidden camera inside Swami-ji’s audience chamber. A cabinet also contained a collection of mini DV tapes.

‘Manika’ was written on one tape dated two days before she died. Damayanti’s tapes took up an entire shelf.

There wasn’t time to watch any of them: it was nearly four-thirty. She had stayed longer than she had planned. So Facecream grabbed Manika’s tape and one of Damayanti’s and headed for the door.

The moment she opened the fireproof – and apparently soundproof – door, she knew she was in trouble.

Maharaj Swami’s audience chamber throbbed with a thudding noise.

The helicopter had returned.

The light came on in the entrance hall.

Voices.

Tucking the tapes into the elastic of her underwear, she made for the secret door, retrieved her chappal and hurried down into the underground passage.

She had gone only about thirty feet when the overhead lights in the passage were switched on.

Footsteps.

She broke into a run.

Reaching the darshan hall exit, Facecream scrambled up the stairs and pushed up the trapdoor.

Standing onstage with a revolver trained on her was Vivek Swaroop, the man in the black sherwani.